When I looked up again the shadow was running away, back along the wall in swift pounding steps. I leaned up on my elbows and squeezed the trigger on Vega’s.38-and the hammer fell on the first of the two chambers I’d emptied earlier. Cursing, I pulled on the second empty chamber, but by the time I had a cartridge in firing position it was too late. He was gone around the far corner of the office wing.
I pushed up against the wall. Ran wobbling to the corner and poked my head around it. No arc lights back there, just three widely spaced night spots in metal cages mounted on the factory wall; the reach of them wasn’t far. He was already out beyond both the light-spill and the Containers, Inc., property, a moving shadow among stationary ones, heading deeper into the war-zone desolation of the old SP yards.
Let him go, you ‘re not up to another chase….
But I was on my way by then, driven by anger that wasn’t as black or volatile as the rage I’d felt toward Vega, but was just as urgent. I plunged across the backstrip of asphalt, running in a low crouch, avoiding the direct glare of the night spots. I could hear myself breathing as I ran, a kind of wheezy panting that was louder in my own ears than the blustery natterings of the wind.
He was well out into the yards now, where the heavy overcast night pressed down and the shapes were inky and formless. I could barely make him out; he was just a moving blob. Beyond the asphalt, the ground was flat and overgrown with weeds and high grass; in low places, puddles left by the recent rains gleamed faintly. I blundered through the grass, sidestepped the puddles as best I could. But I couldn’t generate any speed because of the uncertain footing. He had thirty or forty yards on me already, seemed to be gaining.
He knows this area, I thought, he’s been out here before.
Off to the left, the burned-out, quake-damaged hulks of the old roundhouse and warehouses reared up ghostlike against the dark sky. It appeared he was heading that way … but then I saw him veer off in the opposite direction, around what materialized out of the gloom as a series of low, irregular mounds. I stumbled over something hidden in the grass, lurched, nearly fell; when I regained my balance I could no longer locate him. He’d vanished somewhere behind or near the largest of the masses ahead.
I slowed to a crouching walk, trying to get my breath. Stupid bastard, drop dead of a heart attack, serve you right. It was eerily quiet out here, except for the wind. Like wandering across an alien landscape. And yet surrounding this dead acreage there was light and movement and teeming life-cars rushing along the 101 freeway, on Bayshore Boulevard; chains of lights in hillside houses and the buildings along Industrial and Bayshore and Sunnydale. The city and its neighboring communities all around, thousands of people … but this was a piece of nowhere, a corner of the twilight zone, and I was alone in it with somebody who had just committed a cold-blooded act of violence.
Nearing one of the mounds now, close enough to make out broken chunks of concrete and other rubble. I went around past it, warily; didn’t see or hear him and kept on going toward the larger masses farther out. They coalesced into piles of rotting wooden ties, left here when most of the rails were taken up and removed years ago. I cut between two of the piles, looking left and right-
Something made an audible slithering through the moist grass on my left. I dropped to one knee, stiff-armed the.38 in that direction. But it wasn’t the shooter. Small animal, or maybe a rat. These ruins were probably crawling with rats.
I straightened again, eased forward. In front of me now was flat barren ground, no obstructions or cover for sixty or seventy yards to where a short string of forgotten cars-flats, boxcars, oil tankers-stood on a rusty siding, faintly backlit by streaking headlights on the freeway a quarter of a mile beyond. He wasn’t out that way-or if he was, I couldn’t pick him out. He’d had enough time to get all the way to the cars, hide somewhere among them.
I made myself stand still, briefly, to listen for sounds of him moving. Useless; all I could hear was the wind and the stuttering beat of my heart. I went on, parallel to the string of dead cars, then out toward them. Power lines on spindly poles angled through the yards here, feeding the buildings on Industrial Way; I passed under them, still heading toward the cars.
Motion off to my right, toward the far end of the factory property: shadow gliding among shadows. I cut over that way, running now; stubbed my foot against a chunk of rock and went down on all fours, almost losing the gun. The shadows were still. I got up and bulled ahead, came off flat ground into a bumpy section clotted with grass and weeds and patches of sharp-smelling anise.
Ahead was a low cluster of trees. And beyond them was Industrial Way, the part of it where I had parked my car. I gave the trees a wide berth, plowing through tangles of vegetation, but they weren’t where he was. I knew where he was as soon as I saw the shape of another car drawn up in front of mine, one that hadn’t been there before.
Suckered me, led me out into the yards and then doubled back here to pick up his wheels….
I yelled when his car jumped ahead-a roar of frustration that was lost in the howl of tires biting into pavement. He didn’t switch his lights on until he was out of range of my vision, if he put them on even then. I hadn’t been able to tell what kind of vehicle it was, just that it was shorter and more low-slung than mine. Shadow man in a shadow car.
Who?
Why had he shot Coleman?
I slogged through a puddle of water and the last of the high grass, onto the street next to my car. He was long gone by then. I had a crazy impulse to hammer on the hood with the butt of the.38. Controlled it and walked stiffly around to the driver’s door, put myself inside.
For a time I sat there, fighting off delayed-reaction shakes, putting a tight wrap on my. emotions. Tonight was not the first time I had been shot at, but like an earthquake, it is nothing you ever get used to. Each time is like the first; each time is bad, because once you begin thinking clearly again, you realize how close you came to dying and how fragile your life, all life, really is.
When I felt steady enough I started the car and got it under way. Drove slowly along the empty street … where the hell were the goddamn security patrolmen all this time? … and turned into the factory lot. Near the office wing, my headlights picked out the huddled motionless body on the asphalt. I stopped a few feet away with the lights bright on him.
Coleman lay where he’d fallen, ten feet or so from the entrance to the wing. I squatted, turned him a little. Shot at least twice, once in the belly and once in the middle of the chest. His eyes were open, staring glassily. I put my finger on the artery in his neck, to make sure he had no life left in him. There wasn’t a pulse, hadn’t been a pulse, I thought, since right after the first bullet hit him.
The briefcase was there, too, near one of his legs; I took hold of it before I straightened. The shooter may not have known what it contained, but even if he had, he might not have come back to pick it up. He’d been after Coleman, focused only on Coleman. His one shot at me had come after he was sure he’d bagged his quarry, and it had been designed to keep me down while he made his escape. If he’d cared about taking me out, he’d have fired at me again here or out in the yards. Revenge, then, or some other personal motive. I hadn’t been the only one hunting Coleman Lujack today. And chance had brought the three of us together here, on a convergent path within minutes of one another.
Somebody mixed up in the coyote operation, somebody I didn’t know?
Paco Vega?
Nick Pendarves … if Pendarves wasn’t dead after all?
Teresa Melendez? Eileen Lujack? It could have been a woman, even though I’d kept thinking of the shooter as a man. A woman runs differently, uses a more fluid kind of stride, but it had been too dark, the period of time too confused, for me to be certain of anything about the person….